c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.)
(UNDATED) On Nov. 18, 1978, nearly 1,000 people were murdered in the People’s Temple commune in Jonestown, Guyana. Among the victims was Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., who had come to the cult compound to investigate charges that People’s Temple leader Jim Jones had viciously abused his followers.
Ryan’s visit so alarmed the paranoid Jones that he ordered the death of the congressman along with the cult members.
Despite the horror of what came to be called”the Kool-Aid murders,”destructive cults have proliferated throughout the world, frequently causing physical violence and psychological damage. Unfortunately, the list of cult atrocities has grown.
Seven years ago, a Korean cult, the Church of the Living Stone and Mission for the Coming Days, announced the precise date for the return of Jesus to earth: Oct. 28, 1992.
In anticipation of the great event, more than 5,000 followers left their jobs. When the fateful date passed without an apocalyptic change, four church members committed suicide, and thousands of other devotees declared that”God lied to us.” In 1993, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh convinced his followers that the FBI siege of their Waco, Texas, stronghold was God’s sign that the world’s end was near. Tragically, nearly 90 people, including many children, died in the controversial fire that destroyed the cult’s headquarters.
Fifty-three members of the Order of the Solar Temple, believing they would be transported to a better life, committed suicide in 1994 in Switzerland and Canada. A year later 16 more members of the cult died in France under mysterious conditions.
Soko Asahara and his followers in the Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan released deadly sarin nerve gas into Tokyo’s crowded subways in 1995. Twelve people died and more than 5,000 others were injured. Even though Asahara and other cult leaders are currently on trial in Japan, Aum Shinri Kyo continues to attract more members.
Two years ago, 38 devotees of Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite committed suicide in California. They believed the end of the world was coming in the guise of an unidentified flying object that would accompany the Hale-Bopp comet. The Heaven’s Gate group was confident of being lifted to a glorious life in space, and in preparation for that event some American money was placed in each member’s clothing prior to death.
None of these horrific events surprised Dr. John G. Clark, the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who died last month at age 73.
In the early 1970s Clark sounded a global alarm bell about the growing dangers of destructive cults. He first recognized the threat when several families consulted him about their children’s membership in fringe religious groups.
Shocked by what he observed, Clark called cult tactics”an impermissible experiment”on human beings that employed sophisticated psychological manipulation.
Many in the medical and religious communities were skeptical of Clark’s findings. In 1978, Clark told a seminar”it was only a matter of time before there would be a bloodbath”involving a cult group. Some in his audience laughed, but a few months later Jonestown burst upon the world’s consciousness.
Clark studied the destructive elements in many groups, including the Unification Church and the Hare Krishna movement. He lectured widely and wrote many articles on the cult phenomenon. In 1983, his editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association provoked much interest among his colleagues.
Clark wrote:”The new youth cults, though usually self-styled as religious for purposes of the First Amendment privileges, are increasingly dangerous to the health of their converts and menacing to their critics.” One of Clark’s most important insights was that psychologically manipulative cult recruitment is not always the result of”longstanding conflicts within individuals.”Instead, he said, cults use”pressures that can induce radical personality changes as easily in normally developing people as among disturbed ones.” I vividly remember hearing his brilliant psychological description of how cults deliberately dissemble people’s personalities and then cynically re-assemble them into slave-like members.
His outspoken opposition to destructive cults resulted in some bitter court cases, but through it all Clark remained convinced that his often unpopular battle was in behalf of human rights.
For his extraordinary pioneering efforts Clark received the Rep. Leo J. Ryan award in 1985. In 1991, The Psychiatric Times named him psychiatrist of the year.
Jack Clark was an extraordinary teacher and warm friend for many of us in the counter-cult community. He will be missed.
IR END RUDIN
